13 reasons Koch Empire joins environmentalists

Commentary: Climate-deniers will be major global-warming investors

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Billionaires Charles and David Koch, as world’s leading environmentalists? Sounds absurd, right? Actually it’s inevitable. By the 2020-2030 decade, today’s most powerful climate-deniers, the Koch Brothers (certainly their heirs), will be nudged by global macroeconomic trends to embrace their nemesis.

Reuters

All capitalists are in a race for “what’s left,” the world’s disappearing commodity resources. Here: Panning for gold in the Philippines.

If they don’t, they’ll risk losing the Koch Empire, a vast network of energy and commodity companies generating $115 billion in annual revenues, creating a family fortune of $62 billion. Here’s why this destiny is not only inevitable, they’ll create it:

Begin with Charles Koch on the cover of Forbes special, “World’s Most Powerful People.” Koch’s commanding presence reminds us of great American generals: Grant, Patton, MacArthur — although maybe the great Prussian theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, who believed “war was continuation or expression of politics,” is a better comparison.

Why? Prior to the Romney-Obama vote, Koch said it was “the mother of all wars,” betting over $100 million on a conservative victory “to reshape America,” reports Daniel Fisher in Forbes.

But will Koch heirs fight the same fierce battles as Charles and David?

Charles leads the Koch Empire into battle with liberals, environmentalists, the planet. A true warrior. Just reading the Forbes cover story, “Inside The Koch Empire,” you know he loves this fight: “We get threats from people in Congress, and this is pushed out and becomes part of the culture: That we are evil so we need to be destroyed.”

Evil? Be destroyed? At a deep level there must be a belief their “Empire” is threatened, that they must defend it, counterattack. This is war. They’re using their $115 billion a year Empire to reshape capitalism and politics “in their image.” Armed with “$62 billion net worth, Charles and his brother David have been building their empire for 50 years, and although “their election bet fizzled,” Fisher writes, “rest assured, the Koch Brothers say, they’re just getting started.”

David punctuates the military metaphor: They will fight even harder, smarter, with more resources in “2016 and beyond: We’re going to fight the battle as long as we breathe. We want to bequeath to our children a better and more prosperous America. That means more of the same tactics, as well as whatever new ones election lawyers cook up,” probably countering with a high-tech Obama-style election machine to overwhelm the Democrats.

Yes, the Koch Bros are in a war to “Reshape America:” But they are 77 and 72. In 2030, will their heirs have the passion to wage the same war with the same intensity? Unlikely.

Koch Empire as eco-capitalists and major environmentalists by 2030

The Koch brothers are arch-capitalists in the Ayn Rand tradition, in a war to amass territory, land, assets, capital, politicians, the environment, planet and “reshape it in their image.” You can feel their conviction in Forbes description of their military-style capitalism: “Koch Industries swallowed a fertilizer business, thousands of miles of pipelines, DuPont’s fibers business in 2004 and Georgia-Pacific the following year, all around a consistent theme of converting commodities into more valuable products,” says Forbes.

Yes, the Koch Empire’s core strategy is a “consistent theme of converting commodities into more valuable products.” More commodities converted, more agricultural products, more chemicals, more construction, more lumber, more paper, more everything, plus more pipelines to deliver more and more energy, commodities, food to a global population exploding from seven billion today to 10 billion in the next generation.

But ironically, Koch’s strategy will probably backfire: The next generation of Koch heirs will inherit their vast expanding Empire in a world in which less than a decade ago the Pentagon predicted would face the “mother of all national security issues,” and “by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening. As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks an ancient pattern re-emerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water and energy supplies and warfare defining human life.”

Ask yourself: If these predictions of global warfare materialize in the 2020-2030 decade, will Charles and David’s heirs be able to hold onto the same dogmatic Ayn Rand vision of capitalism that guided Reagan, Greenspan and the Koch Bros. the past generation?

Rand called for a “pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism” that today aggressively denies global warming science, denies scientific evidence of climate change, that invests hundreds of millions in think tanks and politicians who fight for the freedom to treat the environment as a commodity, an exploitable corporate asset, and a perpetual source of profits solely for stockholders and insiders, never the public.

Welcome to a new era of resource depletion and austerity

The Koch Empire is one of the leaders in a war that international security expert Michael Klare warns of in “The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources.” Klare earlier published his classic, “Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict,” a look ahead to a world that he hopes will not “end in war, widespread starvation, or a massive environmental catastrophe,” although he admits they really are “the probable results of persisting in the race for what’s left.”

Bottom line: All capitalists are in a race for “what’s left,” the world’s disappearing commodity resources. And “no matter how much corporate or government officials wish to deny it,” Klare warns, “there is not nearly enough nonrenewable resources on this planet to perpetually satisfy the growing needs of a ballooning world population.”

Yes, free-market capitalism is in a race, a downhill race fueling the great commodity wars that will define human life and human civilization, a perfect storm of global wars, mass starvation, pandemics, environmental catastrophes, total anarchy, emerging dead ahead.

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